My January electric bill is up about 40% from last year, which itself was about 20% higher than it was in 2020. Before you ask: No, I didn’t invest in any new Christmas lights; nor did I suddenly start mining bitcoin. In fact, my Con Edison bill conveniently points out I used slightly less power this year.
It turns out I am just one of millions of middle-class schlubs in New York whose wallets are lighter this winter thanks to the Democratic Party’s catastrophic climate policy — and my humble 40% increase is nowhere near some of the triple-digit horror stories out there.
If you listen to Con Ed, the spike in your bill is a direct consequence of the rising cost of acquiring natural gas, due to its global supply and demand. The past few months, the commodity price has hovered between $4.00 and $6.00/MMBtu, which are averages we haven’t seen since the 2008 financial crisis.
It would be criminal not to mention that President Joe Biden scrapping the Keystone pipeline and pausing new oil and gas leases his first week in office have contributed. But for New Yorkers, the biggest culprit is closer to home.
With his typical self-aggrandizing fanfare, former Gov. Andrew Cuomo proudly announced he’d be shutting down the final two units at the Indian Point nuclear plant 14 years earlier than federal regulators required. With the click of a PowerPoint slide, the Luv Guv pulled the plug on more than 2,000 megawatts of carbon-free power, which accounted for 25% of New York City’s supply.
Fast forward, and it’s clear Indian Point’s closure has led to New York burning significantly more fossil fuels to keep up with demand. That’s right: The party of “science” and climate justice turned off our spigot of clean energy, forced us to produce more energy from natural gas and fuel oils and is now raiding our pocketbooks to pay for it.
Here is the shocker: None of this was a surprise.
While Democrats in Albany were weighing these decisions, countless policy experts, dozens of editorialists and several clear-eyed environmentalists made the case that burning fossil fuels would be the only result of hastily closing Indian Point. In fact, when Cuomo shut the first of two reactors in 2020, the state’s share of power from fossil fuels rose from 36% to 40%. Democrats deemed that a success, as did the legacy environmental groups that cheered them on, like Scenic Hudson and Riverkeeper — as though two organizations formed in the 1960s to oppose power plants would be objective.
Now that Indian Point is fully decommissioned, the problem is even starker. On Thursday, for example, New York state power producers generated 6,880MW by burning fossil fuels, compared with only 4,400MW on Feb. 10, 2020, while Indian Point was still operating.
Democrats would love to frame this new planet-harming policy as the work of evil oil and gas lobbyists or some Foghorn Leghorn-sounding Republican. But no, it was Cuomo’s Queens drawl that hyped the need to close Indian Point and his far-left Democratic colleagues who kept assuring us he knew what he was doing.
Some competence: Cuomo’s mistakes extend well beyond the decision to shutter Indian Point, as he waded into the waters of how best and how quickly to replace it.
In April, Cuomo declared the state soon would be generating 11,000MW of renewable energy to make up the shortfall. As of today, wind and solar generate fewer than 1,800MW, and Con Ed estimates its customers only receive 28MW from solar.
And while Gov. Kathy Hochul just broke ground on the South Fork Wind farm, it will take years to bring its measly 130MW online. According to the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority, none of the state’s planned 4,300MW of wind power will be operational for several years, and even then, the growth will be incremental.
In the long term, wind-turbine development will bear the fruit of cost-effective power. Ironically, it’s red states that are leading the way, with thousands of megawatts under construction and coming online across the Midwest, especially in Texas, Oklahoma, Nebraska and the Dakotas. There, private landowners and corporations often spearhead construction, in contrast to a top-down government approach.
Unsurprisingly, those states all have far lower retail energy prices than New York, with Oklahomans paying about half what we do for electricity.
But those of us living in the Empire State, which recently lost one of its most economical and cleanest sources of energy, will have to continue tightening our belts. Our skyrocketing energy bills won’t be heading down any time soon, as long as the price of fossil fuels surge and while our producers slowly develop new options. At least we’re saving the planet.
Joe Borelli is the minority leader of the New York City Council and a former member of the state Assembly’s energy committee.
